Dark Silver
by ashesandhoney
Summary: William Herondale is in love with his parabatai's fiance. He can survive the days that he can avoid seeing them together but after a malfunctioning portal lands the three of them hundreds of miles from home, they are trapped together. Hundreds of miles from London, from help, and from the yin fen that Jem needs to survive.


A finger jabbed into the side of his head woke him up. He muttered a swear word and turned his face into the warmth beside him. Will hadn't slept much the night before. He'd been out wandering London and not thinking about anything. At least that had been his intention. He'd spent most of the walk thinking about Tessa and the rest of it thinking about ways to convince Cecily to go home. He'd been tired enough when he got back that he had collapsed into Jem's bed and fallen asleep immediately.

Jem poked him again. "Do you ever look where you're going?"

"Did I bump into a lady with an ugly hat?" Will asked.

He wasn't moving. He had every intention of sleeping through breakfast. If Jem wanted to get up and go and listen to Cecily be a little ball of brightness and enthusiasm about Shadowhunting then he was welcome to it. Will would just stay here. He was warm and comfortable and for all his poking Jem was half lying on him and the weight of another person was enough to blot out the worst of his thoughts.

"Wake up, you lazy bastard," Jem said.

"Go on without me, just leave me here to die," Will said.

"Take your ridiculous melodrama back to your own room," Jem hissed.

"I'm wounded. Deeply," Will muttered.

Rather than answering, Jem twisted away from him and then back again. It was less like Jem was trying to push him out of bed, which he was halfway expecting, and more like the kind of lurch that came with a nightmare or a fever dream. Will was immediately awake. Jem had sounded fine. Had been fine. Fine for weeks now. Will rolled up on his elbow and realized why Jem's voice had been so annoyed.

The weight against his shoulder hadn't been Jem.

It was Tessa.

He stared for a little too long and with no idea what his expression was doing. He wasn't sure he could remember the last time he hadn't known what expression was on his face. He had probably still been in Wales.

Her hair was braided but falling loose. He had just gotten into bed with her and Jem without looking and she'd rolled up against him in the night. She had woken with a start from some sort of nightmare and Jem had caught her face and turned her to look at him. Will stared stupidly at the back of her head while Jem shot him a glare over her shoulder.

"It was just a dream," Jem was saying to her in that soft voice he didn't use with with anyone else. Will needed to leave but her leg was hooked over his and he was tangled in the blankets and he was still too dumbstruck to remember how to get up.

He had just spent the night in bed with the girl he was in love with.

And her fiance.

"You, Nate, I thought," she stumbled over the words.

"Just a dream. They'll pass, the nightmares pass eventually," Jem said.

"Nate didn't deserve to die like that," she said.

Will's conscious self hadn't caught up. He made a face, she couldn't see it, she hadn't even noticed that he was there yet. Jem pulled her into his arms so she could rest her head on his shoulder. Jem gave Will that look again. They had mastered a sort of shorthand that didn't really translate. Jem's look said that he agreed with Will's opinion that Nate probably could have died slower and bloodier and still deserved worse but that if he said something like that to Tessa, it wouldn't end well.

The look also said, "Get out."

Will cracked a smile.

"Get out," Jem mouthed at him though his lip twitched in response.

Tessa's breathing had evened out and the moment that she realized that Will was there was going to awful. He wasn't going to be able to escape without her noticing now that she was actually awake. Hopefully, he'd be able to blame sleep deprivation or perhaps temporary madness for what he said next.

It was probably the madness.

The way she was relaxing into Jem was killing him by degrees. He could not watch them share a private moment. He could barely watch them sit side by side at the breakfast table with clothing and manners and space between them.

"Could you possibly give me my legs back?" he asked in the most polite voice he could muster. It was the kind of voice he usually saved for asking for sugar at high tea with some titled Lady who had something he needed.

Tessa pulled up sharply and spun on him and while that was what he had wanted, he immediately felt guilty for it. She twisted around to look at him and managed to end up sitting on Jem's lap with her legs still twisted with Will's. He gave them both the smarmiest grin he could muster. He could either be apologetically embarrassed or offensive. Anything between those two extremes was beyond him in that moment so he had defaulted to offensive. He raised his eyebrows and her shock narrowed into baffled anger. Her expression was as eloquent as any of Jem's. It very clearly said that she might slap him.

Slapping would be preferable to all the cuddling.

"What are you doing here?" she asked.

"Sneaking into James' bed on a bad night was my habit long before it was yours," Will said.

Her mouth fell open and she turned scarlet and he felt guilty again. He held onto feeling guilty because maybe it would prevent him from feeling anything else. She was adorable when she was sleep rumpled and confused.

"Stop," Jem said. Sharp and low.

Before that tone of voice could become a fight that Will did not want to be having, Henry walked into the room. He appeared in mid-sentence. His hair stuck up on one side as though he had been sleeping on his arm and forgotten to smooth it down. His shirt was untucked and his striped waistcoat was buttoned unevenly. He was talking and shuffling blueprints in his hand. He had done this before. He forgot that one knocked before one just opened a bedroom door. He was mid explanation and had probably forgotten that no one could actually hear him while he walked down the hallways alone.

"Perhaps this is best kept a secret," Will said fast and quiet.

Jem sighed in annoyance. It wasn't artful and Tessa was still too alarmed to be helpful but they managed to stuff her under the blankets. Jem slept with a duvet that made the bed a lumpy mess on the best of days and while it would have been obvious to someone paying attention that there was another person hiding in the bed, Henry still hadn't actually looked up. It had taken about ten seconds.

Henry finally looked up and paused. He had been talking about magic balances and frowning at a paper. He cocked his head to the side and smiled at Will. For all Will's judgements on Henry's messy hair, he knew that he didn't look any better. He took a moment to try and smooth his curls down into something that resembled order but it probably didn't work. Not that Henry was going to notice.

"Oh you are here, that's good, I thought you might be when your room was empty," Henry said.

Jem's lips were a little tighter than usual but he flashed a smile at Henry as he settled back against the headboard. Will readjusted himself so that the blankets were more twisted and obscured the shape of anything below them. Tessa jabbed him in the ribs and he stopped moving. Her legs were over his lap and her nightgown was bunched up around him which meant it wasn't covering as much of her as it was supposed to and even if he couldn't see that, couldn't stop himself from he knowing it.

He had no idea what Henry was talking about.

"Henry," Jem finally managed to get a word in to interrupt him, "Can we please save complex mathematics for after breakfast?"

Henry looked up and blinked. His hair was a mess and he looked like he had been awake for hours. He had probably been awake most of the night if he was in the middle of some project. Will raised his eyebrows and Jem had a kind, earnest, inarguable smile on his face. Henry looked down at his blueprints and then back up.

"I suppose so, do you think it's about time for breakfast then?" he asked.

"Yes," they said together.

"Well, perhaps Lottie will have some ideas on the conversions, it's unusual for a spell to use more than one language and multiple demon languages too," Henry said.

"We will help you look for other examples in the library as soon as we are dressed and fed, tea at the very least," Jem said.

Henry finally left the room after two more false starts at explaining. Will huffed and slouched back. He had gone from the inability to stop thinking about Tessa to forgetting there was a girl in his lap and now her knees were over his stomach and that was far worse than over his legs where they had been a moment ago. Perhaps if he pretended hard enough, he could imagine her someplace else, anywhere else.

"Why did you have to volunteer us both?" Will grumbled.

Jem ignored him to help Tessa up out of the mess of blankets. She finally managed to get herself seated in the bed so she wasn't touching Will. It was a vast improvement. Her nightdress was smoothed back down and tucked in place. He would not let himself even think about the fact that the distance was disappointing.

"Go get dressed," Jem said.

"No, you've volunteered me to spend the morning in the library up to my neck in demonology spell books. The only thing worse than trying to read Purgatic is trying to read spells in Purgatic. The only way it could be worse if if we were trying to read spells in Purgatic first thing in the morning, oh but we are," Will said.

"You're moaning about that?" Tessa asked.

"Says the girl who can't read Purgatic and is therefore spared the parsing of spell book grammar," Will said.

She frowned at him. She sat in the nest of blankets, close enough to touch, her knee against Jem's and her hair tugged out of her braid so it was haloing around her head. He gave her a lazy shrug as though enough insouciance could insulate him from wanting to smooth her hair down and kiss that little frown line between her eyebrows. It wasn't working.

Her embarrassment and her confusion were gone and she rolled her eyes at him. She was still angry but it wasn't as hostile as it had been before Henry had interrupted them. She pushed her hair back with both hands before turning to brace both of her feet against his hip, lean into Jem for leverage and push him out of the bed.

He hit the floor with a whomp and Jem started to cackle and a moment later Tessa joined him.

"The both of you are terrors and you deserve each other," Will said rolling to his feet.

They were leaning together, laughing at him. He crossed his arms and Tessa started to laugh harder. She rested her head on Jem's shoulder and laughed until she was gasping for breath as she said, "You're so tall and angry and your hair is ridiculous."

"My hair is perfect, multitudes are overcome by jealousy when they so much as recall my hair to memory," Will said.

She didn't look at him while she trailed into giggles. He glanced at Jem who just shrugged.

Leave.

The little sane part of his mind whispered it over and over.

Leave.

Leave.

Leave.

He hadn't heard her laugh like that in a long time. Maybe he had never heard it. He couldn't remember anymore if he had ever heard her laugh like that. He couldn't leave that laughter and know he was never going to hear it again, at least never hear it directed at him again. So he threw a pillow at her face. He was not eight years old. She was not his little sister but he did it anyways. Jem glared and spread his hands like he couldn't believe it. Jem's expression was calling him all sorts of rude names but Will had already started this.

She surprised them both when she picked up the pillow and smacked Will with it. She came up out of Jem's arms and across the bed faster than he had expected but certainly not faster than he could have avoided. Surprise or a stupid desire to stretch this bizarre little moment out as far as it could be stretched kept him in place.

"Go away," she said after slapping him across the face with white cotton and goose down wielded like a weapon.

"You're the one creeping about, all unmarried and in bed with boys," Will shot back and he knew even as it escaped that it was too far over the line. She gave him a look that reminded him that he had once told her he loved her and that he had once told her she was no better than a whore and that he hadn't been forgiven for either.

And the moment was gone. Shattered and broken because he didn't know how to watch his mouth.

"We aren't, we didn't," she started.

"I know," Will said, "I apologize and it is none of my business. I'll see you at breakfast."

And he turned and left as fast as he could.


End file.
